1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to on-chip thermal management and, more particularly, to the use of on-chip temperature sensors and power supply voltage regulators to control the power and temperature of integrated circuits.
2. Description of the Related Art
On-chip power and thermal management is one of the most important issues in today's very large integrated circuits (VLSI) design. Conventional semiconductor cooling devices on the chip and chip package cannot effectively dissipate the excessive amount of heat generated by today's high-power circuits. As the circuit feature size continues to shrink and the power density continues to rise, new devices and design techniques are needed to alleviate the on-chip heat dissipation problem.
Furthermore, it has become more difficult to dissipate the heat from the backside of the wafer as the wafer thickness increases from, e.g., 0.7 mm for an 8-inch wafer to 1.0 mm for a 12-inch wafer to provide the mechanical strength needed to support large wafers. The migration from bulk complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology to silicon on insulator (SOI) technology also aggravates the heat dissipation problem by using the buried oxide layer that has a greater thermal resistance than the silicon.